RUSH: Watching this vote and watching these Democrats cheer, this is the biggest assault on freedom and liberty yet to occur in the United States Congress. And then to learn that the Stupak amendment was part of this, that the pro-lifers ended up buying into this whole thing because funds were going to be taken out of health care to buy abortions when you know they’re going to go back in? We have a Democrat congressman already saying it’s going to go back in. I love the pro-life community, I’m pro-life myself, but single-issue politics is just deadly. I mean, what are we supposed to do? Are we all supposed to support the bill because it has this Stupak amendment in it?
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RUSH: I’m looking at the call screener, the roster of callers. It says the next caller is a woman named ‘Bruce.’ So, Bruce, welcome to the EIB Network. It’s great to have you here. Hello.
CALLER: I’m a guy, not a woman. Sorry.
RUSH: (laughing) No, it’s a Snerdley typo. Bruce at Fort Wayne, Indiana. By the way, great to have you here, Bruce.
CALLER: Always a pleasure, sir. I want to know why the Republicans voted for the Stupak amendment. If they voted against it, it would have put the so-called Blue Dog Democrats on the spot to vote for the bill. They should have voted against it, but they were afraid of some sort of campaigning in 2010. Why did they vote for it? Were they myopically focused on it? I mean, what’s with this?
RUSH: It is an important issue to a lot of people, therefore to many people it’s the only issue that counts. Single-issue politics. This is one of the problems I have with it. I’ve always railed against this, by the way. I’ve railed against single-issue politics. Because in this case, Bruce, they should have known that this is not going to survive in the final version of this bill. They should have known this was a trick in order to get the pro-life votes. The thing that really frosts me about this is that this whole bill is about death. This whole bill is about rationing who gets coverage and who doesn’t and under what circumstances. It is the single greatest tool the government will have to regulate every aspect of behavior. This is a freedom-killing — and it is going to end up being a life-threatening — bill. Human beings will die earlier than normal, than necessary, because of this bill! There will be bureaucratic institutions, bureaucracies, which will make decisions on who gets treated and what kind of treatment they get, and who doesn’t get treated. But because they thought the bill had been improved to say that no money would be used to fund abortions, then it was okay to support the bill.
The whole thing could have been killed. The whole thing could have been killed if they’d have just ignored this. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who is one of the most strident feminists in the Democrat caucus (and she’s from Boca) was on MSNBC today, and she said, ‘I’m confident that when it comes back from the conference committee that that language [the Stupak amendment] won’t be there…. And I think we’re all going to be working very hard, particularly the pro-choice members, to make sure that’s the case.’ Now, some people think the bill would have passed regardless, whether the Stupak amendment was there or not, and because Pelosi would have found some other way to get the votes. And that probably is the case. But this… This was just unfortunately shortsighted.
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RUSH: Greg in Moline, Illinois, great to have you on the program. Hello, sir.
CALLER: Thanks, Rush. Can I first say that you have single-handedly helped shape my view of life in the last 15 years I’ve been listening to you?
RUSH: Why, thank you very much for that. I hope you have a decent outlook on life?
CALLER: Well, politically primarily, but you have been a true hero of mine, and I just want you to know how much I appreciate that.
RUSH: Well, thank you. Thank you very much.
CALLER: I am a strong pro-lifer and support the causes of many of those organizations, but ever since they started asking us to send petitions to say ‘include language that excludes abortions’ I thought: This has been a great ploy of the Democratic Party to — last minute, as what happened on Saturday — say, ‘Okay, we’ll drop the abortion as long as you vote for the bill,’ and I think they’ve been planning this for months, to use this ploy. Do you agree?
RUSH: I wouldn’t be surprised. I know that Pelosi would do anything to get this passed, and she’s not — I’ll tell you something else that she did. There are seven Democrats… I’ve got somewhere here in the stack; I’ll just try to tell you this from my memory, paraphrasing it. There are seven prominent Democrat members of Congress who, apparently, unbeknownst to anybody (until Saturday), were facing ethics investigations or charges in the House. And just somehow, a staffer’s computer had the file sharing turned on and the memo talking about the possibility of these seven Democrats being investigated was released to the media. One of the Democrats was Jane Harman from California who is not… I mean, she and Pelosi are at odds. So she put an order out that everybody had to be on the House floor to vote or else. So she used the taint of corruption. I mean, the Speaker of the House determines the speed at which ethics investigations take place. The Speaker of the House runs the show. So that’s another thing she did. If just three of those people had not even shown up, or if they had voted some other way, then this whole thing would have failed. So, you know, the vast majority of the votes here were not for this. These votes were coerced or they were tricked or they were strong-armed or something.
And now because this one Republican, this ‘Cash’ Cao guy from Louisiana, from New Orleans — this is a guy that replaced Congressman William Jefferson (Democrat-Louisiana), ‘Cold Cash Bill’ [‘Dollar Bill’], had the 90 Gs in the freezer, and they finally ran him outta there — and so this guy, Cao, Joseph Cao, C-a-o is how you spell it. ‘Cash Cao’ is his new nickname. If you go to his website you find Obama bought him off with the promise of increased Medicaid payments (or Medicare payments, one of the two) to some people in his district. So we got one Republican vote for it. How many Democrats voted against this thing? Was it 39? She couldn’t lose 40. She had 39 Blue Dogs, I’m pretty sure, vote no on this to save themselves. Other Blue Dogs had to vote yes. So she needed 39. She couldn’t lose 40. She got 39 Democrats. She got this one guy, this one guy with Obama. So now one Republican votes for this thing and the media and everybody out there talking about it — honestly, folks — as a bipartisan result. Not that 39 Democrats voted against it, but that one Republican voted for it, Joseph ‘Cash’ Cao from New Orleans, which makes the bill bipartisan. I mean, it’s just…
So to answer your question out there, Bruce: To me there’s no question that there was any kind of chicanery — and I bet, you know, even if they hadn’t tried the trick on the Stupak amendment, that they would have found something else to engineer the votes. She was going to get them one way or the other. Now we’re ‘dead on arrival’ in the Senate. DOA. Do you believe that? I’m not sure I do.